Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar, daughters of late sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar, have their individual niches in world music: Jones with her jazz-pop identity and piano prowess and Shankar composing on the sitar following her father's legacy. Which is probably why it's taken the half-sisters this long to work on an album together.

They've collaborated on two tracks for Anoushka's seventh album Traces of You — 'The Sun Won't Set' and 'Unsaid'. The album came out earlier this month.

"This song ['The Sun Won't Set'] was a great example of putting in work first in order to enable spontaneity. I sent a rough mock-up to Norah and she liked it. Before traveling to New York, Nitin [Sawhney, producer and collaborator] and I redid a rough arrangement for her to sing over," Shankar told Rolling Stone.

"Once we were all in a room together, we decided to chuck everything and just record live, and I'm so grateful we did," Shankar added. "We were able to really listen and respond to each other and somehow really locked in to perform a live take together beautifully, even though the three of us had never played all together before."

Her father Pandit Ravi Shankar passed away while she was working on the album, and the compositions became a tribute to him. The lyrics become more poignant when you remember that the name Ravi means 'the sun' in Sanskrit.

Their second collaborative track, 'Unsaid' seems to hint at Jones's long estranged relationship with her father.

"A few weeks after my father's passing, I couldn't sleep on the flight to New York, and wrote the lyrics for 'Unsaid' during that journey," Shankar told The Wall Street Journal. "When I reached New York, my sister Norah took those lyrics and almost immediately began to sing it in the melody she ended up using on the record. My solo flowed naturally out of me in response to her singing. There was a way in which I felt very open to discovery, rather than focused on a fixed destination, and that openness is what led me to a song that means a lot to me."

"Norah's singing is really beautiful here, as always, but I find it particularly moving," she added.

Shankar will also be touring in the next couple of months (itinerary here). Her tour will end in India in December 2013; she's scheduled to perform in Mumbai on December 12 and Delhi on December 14.